You’ll have to learn about your niche

While you’re still new to the niche, you might have your terminology for things.

Your customers use well-known industry terms, so you must learn them too. Using incorrect terminology not only makes it more difficult to communicate with your customers, but it also impacts your credibility with them.

So you should learn the jargon

Supplybunny evolved from a previous venture where we had leads instead of orders. When we pivoted towards Supplybunny we continued using that terminology. As a result, we kept confusing our customers. We realized this and switched to using orders when talking to customers.

Inventing your names for things can easily happen when you stumble upon a niche with which you are unfamiliar. You should recognize the change in your target market and learn about it, including the terminology.

It can also happen when you build a feature that exists on other platforms. For instance, you allow customers to pick up packages and refer to that as “self-collect”. However, if the rest of the existing market calls that “pickup” you’re adding a moment of hesitation because the user has to parse an unfamiliar word.

And you must use it internally as well

You might also end up in a situation where you use different terminology with the customers and within your team.

For instance, after we switched to using “orders” with customers, we kept using “leads” internally for some time.

When we made a conscious effort to switch to orders internally, communication got easier.

Then be consistent

Once you learn the correct jargon, you should use it uniformly throughout: with customers, your team and in the application.

You should also not use two different terms that mean the same thing.

For instance, you might have “bank transfer” and “wire transfer”. While you know they mean the same thing, your users will inevitably ask about the difference between the two.